Best Practices for Optimizing Adobe Campaign Folder Structure

THE KEY TAKEAWAY

Optimizing folder structure in Adobe Campaign and, to an extent, every file directory is crucial for any business to remain well organized and reduce operational inefficiencies. After speaking with several Adobe Campaign managers, marketers and thought leaders, Softcrylic determined various folder structure best practices that require minimal fiscal investment. Organizations that implement these best practices in their Adobe Campaign environment and develop an effective folder structure can improve employee productivity, reduce training costs, and reduce campaign creation time by 49 percent on average.

OVERVIEW

For many campaign managers, pushing out a campaign on time is priority number one, and with the constant threat of last-minute changes from compliance, quality assurance, and other stakeholders, every second counts. As a result, the extra time it takes to navigate an unoptimized folder structure can potentially delay a campaign and ruin the validity of certain time-specific KPIs. Not only that, but marketing teams with a disorganized folder structure usually find it almost impossible to successfully hand off a campaign from one manager to another without additional instructions. Failing to get a campaign out on time due to the issues caused by a clunky and disorganized folder structure sounds like a far-fetched excuse when reporting to a higher-up. However, this type of campaign delay happens more often than you think.

For example, without an optimized folder structure, some campaign managers will sometimes mislabel documents or save files in a temporary place in an effort to push out campaigns on schedule. This practice is usually not an issue as the responsible manager would know where they saved everything. However, if the campaign manager leaves unexpectedly or is unavailable due to illness without providing instructions, the newly assigned person will likely run into multiple problems. This breakdown of file organization and procedure risks bottlenecking a company’s campaign pipeline until the files are found. However, the company could avoid this problem if a straightforward and easy-to-follow folder structure was in place for all campaign managers to use at all times. In this way, whenever a marketing team member receives a campaign that’s not their’s they will still know exactly where to search in Adobe Campaign and continue the campaign creation process with minimal delay.

Listed below in no particular order of importance are several best practices that campaign managers and administrators can implement in their folder structure to better navigate their Adobe Campaign environment and avoid potential bottlenecks.

BEST PRACTICES

Create a standardized folder naming convention:

To every marketer or campaign manager who just read this and sighed, either because this is so basic or is on a team that struggles with this exact thing every single day – we get it. This concept seems simple, yet with an almost infinite number of ways to standardize folder naming, people can get confused. However, any organization needs to determine its folder naming convention either by a collaborative group decision or simply by a single person. It does not matter how it gets done as long as it gets done. By creating standardization that works best with your organization, finding anything can become a simple process. Once established, searching by date, name, or keyword is feasible, allowing employees to get what they need and go about their day. In the future, look out for our blog post: “Best practices for optimizing file naming conventions” for specific tips on how to label files to stay organized.

Section folders by year and month:

Unsure how to start reorganizing your folder structure? In this case, time is on your side. Sorting folders by year and month is an easy way to take some guesswork out of where a campaign is located. However, before reorganizing your folders this way, make sure everyone is on the same page when agreeing on the dating convention to avoid confusion. There are many ways to write a date. For example, you could use day/month/year or month/day/year in which the months are also spelled out. One possible dating convention is the widely accepted international dating standard of year, month, day in YYYYMMDD format.

Make a separate folder for test workflows:

Without a proper distinction between testing and marketing workflows, new campaign creation can quickly become disorganized. For instance, a workflow still in development and without the proper distinction can easily be used unknowingly by a campaign manager when setting up their latest campaign with potentially disastrous consequences. By having a dedicated folder to test and tinker with workflows, managers won’t have to worry about this issue and can continue to optimize their campaigns for future success.

Other folder sectioning approaches in Adobe Campaign:

Comparing the overall outcome and KPIs of similar campaigns is essential when optimizing marketing efforts. Therefore, sectioning your folders in Adobe Campaign to reflect these groupings is a reasonable way to improve overall efficiency. For example, you can section campaigns by whether it’s Adhoc or automated, by intention like acquisition or engagement, by target audiences such as members or prospects, or even if the campaign is live or archived. However, it’s important to note that there can never be any campaign or folder overlap in your folder structure to maintain clarity.

Avoid creating too many subfolders:

If your organization already has a folder structure in place, take a step back and think about just how many subfolders you need to click through to get to the file you need. You might be able to find any file, but ask yourself if it’s efficient. Companies need to strike the right balance between practical and organized, and having too many subfolders is a common problem. By increasing the number of specific folders per level and reducing the number of subfolders, users can easily save and recall files while still maintaining an organized system.

Create shortcuts to the most used folders:

One of the most sure-fire ways to reduce time searching through Adobe Campaign’s file directory is by using views. A view displays the records stored in one or more folders that are the same folder type as the view. A view works similarly to a shortcut. This best practice might seem like a no-brainer; however, a couple of minutes saved getting to your most-used workflows and campaigns every day across multiple managers starts to add up over time.

In order to set up a view, add a folder that is the same type as the folder(s) you want to link to the view. Then, right-click on the new folder and select Properties… Next, switch over to the Restrictions tab and select This folder is a view, then all records in similar folder(s) will appear in the view. If you do not want all records to appear in the view, you can use the filtering conditions under the Restrictions tab to limit the records that appear in the view. Limiting records is also useful when viewing campaigns created in the past two weeks or the length of the campaign creation process.

Create and update a folder structure outline:

As a guide for new employees, creating and updating an outline of your company’s Adobe Campaign folder structure is a great way to accelerate their knowledge. A folder structure outline can explain why the structure is the way it is and help new managers access and save files correctly from the get-go. This document can also work as an easy way to visualize a company’s current folder structure when improvements need to be made later down the line.

BENEFITS

After gathering real-world examples and testimonies from multiple sources, Softcrylic recognized several major benefits that organizations can realize by adopting these best practices into their Adobe Campaign folder structure. Benefits include improved employee productivity, reduced onboarding costs, and reduced campaign creation time.

IMPROVED EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY

Organizations need to have a practical and easy-to-follow folder structure in order to make improvements to employee productivity. By reorganizing folder structure to eliminate unnecessary subfolders and other redundancies, stakeholders can spend less time navigating and more time focused on their higher-level duties and value add-tasks. As a result, campaign manager productivity can improve by an average of 67 percent when navigating through Adobe campaign’s file directory. Furthermore, this would allow companies to save money and possibly reduce the number of marketers and campaign managers needed for their marketing efforts.

REDUCED TRAINING COSTS

Depending on the role, a new employee can spend weeks or even months training on the job before a company can begin to see a return on investment. Because of this, companies strive to effectively train their employees as quickly as possible and ensure they know the ins and outs of their new position. By optimizing folder structure and developing an outline, new Adobe Campaign users will have an easier time navigating through folders and reduce the need of interrupting more experienced employees for additional help. With these best practices in place, we estimate that new employees can reduce the time needed for folder structure training by 48 percent. Therefore, by having a reduced training period, the total cost of training is inherently reduced and frees up capital for the company to save or use in other areas.

REDUCED CAMPAIGN CREATION TIME

By optimizing folder structure, and depending on how disorganized their company’s old structure was, users can save a couple of seconds to entire hours depending on the current project. For instance, users save a massive amount of time when setting up new campaigns by using templates and workflow logic from previous campaigns. With an organized folder structure, the low-value add task of searching for these old campaigns, which can sometimes take hours as mentioned by our interviewers, would only take minutes. As a result, we estimate that campaign managers can reduce campaign creation time by 49 percent on average.

FINAL THOUGHTS

A second saved is a second earned, and in order to stay competitive, an organization needs to constantly improve its processes through time savings. Subsequently, optimizing folder structure is one of the most overlooked ways a company can save its employees time and improve its processes. Back when files were entirely physical and sometimes took up entire rooms, employees every so often had to spend hours looking for specific documents if their folder structure was unorganized. Although we have come a long way in terms of storing and accessing information, the way we label and sort our files hasn’t changed all that much. As a result, if a company cannot provide their employees with a clear folder structure, employees will likely misfile documents and become frustrated when they have to needlessly search through one folder at a time to retrieve a document, hampering productivity in the process. By implementing our best practices for optimizing Adobe Campaign folder structure, you and your campaign managers can save time in several areas and be one step closer to no longer being overwhelmed with last-minute changes to your campaigns.